RightScale has renewed its quest for The Meta Cloud.
On Monday the Santa Barbara, California startup unveiled a new version of its Cloud Management Platform, an online service meant to grease the use of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and other so-called infrastructure clouds, including GoGrid and Rackspace's Cloud …

More about Opscode Chef...

RightScale has been doing some really awesome stuff with Chef, and we're honored to have them as partners & contributors to the project. They hare the first (that I am aware of) to bridge multiple cloud infrastructure providers... something that has been hyped by a number of people for some time. Hopefully this is the first of many good things to come.

If you want to learn a little more about Chef & how it works in other environments (including traditional servers & desktop environments), please check out the following:

This stuff makes me laugh :-)

"You specify what resources each virtual server requires, and at runtime, RightScale's system uses these recipes to cook up server instances in a way that's independent from cloud architectures, system architectures, and operating systems."

If it is "independent" from such architectures and systems, why does it depend on them?

More snake oil. I'll continue to roll out traditional data centers until IBM, Microsoft and Google are all swapping services with each other. (That's another way of saying "clouds don't scale", if you are completely computer & networking illiterate. Which most of these marketing bozos seem to be.)

not so interesting, actually

Cade, thanks for a good report! I understand why you use the "meta cloud" analogy, but we're trying to avoid being thought of as a cloud. Our users run their servers in Amazon, RackSpace, GoGrid, Eucalyptus, etc. That's the cloud they're using. RightScale is the management platform they use to manage all these cloud resources. In the end our users are in control of their servers, disk volumes, IP addresses as they get them from the infrastructure cloud provider, We just enable then, make it easier, save time, reduce risk.

Just a comment on deltacloud and libcloud: while I'm adamant that a "standard" API is only a tiny fraction of the problem I also support the emerging efforts. They don't solve the problem but the industry has to start somewhere. Any progress made will help us and may eventually grow into something really good. We've been rather distant from the efforts so far because we have our hands full with projects that benefit customers today, we're already spread very thin.